


His Hero

by ChillBowieTriad



Category: Ender's Game - All Media Types
Genre: Anal Sex, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Manipulation, Love Confessions, M/M, Masturbation, Spanking, Teacher-Student Relationship, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-04
Updated: 2014-03-08
Packaged: 2018-01-03 11:42:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1070065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChillBowieTriad/pseuds/ChillBowieTriad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their minds are connected in ways that cannot be explained. On the day before he destroys the Fornix, Andrew tells Mazer how he truly feels--but in ways that only they can understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rackham's Thoughts

**Author's Note:**

> Appearance-wise this is going off of the movie, and I'm gonna say that Ender is about 14 here (may not actually be in the actual plot but for the purposes of this story let's imagine it's so). The actor himself is 16, so it works out. There are a couple of references to the book also.

He could feel the boy’s mental gears shifting.  
It was loud at first, the chrome on chrome grind of working on a particularly difficult calculus problem.  
When he stole glances at that fantasy game he was always immersed in, completely in his own way, when he deemed it appropriate for everyone to be watching the depths of his feelings unfold—that’s when it would whistle.  
When he was commanding, Mazer had to leave the room. 

It wasn’t for the reasons Ender thought—Mazer felt those wide green-blue eyes begging at his footsteps every time the words, “MISSION SUCCESS” flashed quietly on the screen in front of the young boy.

Ender thought it was because he wasn’t good enough. The wizened war hero knew better: when the boy was commanding, his mind sang. 

It was unlike anything Mazer had ever encountered. He had looked his charge in the eye and told him that he had had other pupils; that others had tried and failed: that he was just the same as those who had come before him.  
He didn’t tell Ender about the sweeping orchestra he heard every time he observed the young Commander in his element, the cataclysmic symphony that rang with such harmonic precision within, filling Mazer with something like hope. It was a dangerous thing, and the power it held over the older man he strategically refused to show. 

Which was why he kept his distance. The first time he met the young Commander he had sensed only a red flower blossoming from seeds of early-planted admiration and awe—he had felt the sunlight of the boy’s approval and respect and, yes, even worship. Ender did not need to know, with all that was happening and all that they were preparing for, and thereby complicate his training by throwing an old man’s conflicted emotions into the mix. 

So every time he saw the young lad he gave him a curt nod, watched the light on the seas of his gaze dim and flicker as they turned back toward shore. When he saw him during what precious little break time they had, he acknowledged him only with a wave of his hand. 

Ender didn’t watch the way Mazer’s eyes swung back to his charge as he ate—they were like a hungry, violent thing who was looking, still, for the blow from its master’s hand. 

The Colonel meditated on it, tried to connect with the dissonance inside him, this growing and painful thing which was eating away at the strongholds of his logic. 

We all might die soon anyway, it whispered to him in the small hours between 0200 and 0400.  
Whatever you do to him will not be worse than what you have already done.  
You’ve already committed worse crimes than this.  
You could get away with it.  
And, once, on a day where he felt the taste of the ash in his mouth more than he had felt in a long time: I would be gentle.  
He wondered if the young Commander had already experimented with anyone. Mazer found himself drawn to the information, a fly to honey. Who had it been with? Had he enjoyed it? What could he, Mazer, have done better? 

The night he had allowed himself the briefest glimpse of how it could be, he also found his hand slipping into the white officer slacks of his uniform. And as the thought of how he would treat Ender washed over him, he needed only one stroke before he felt himself spilling. 

He did this as he sat across from the boy at their weekly evaluation. 

Mazer knew the day was coming where the boy would be tested to the outmost, where he and his team would face the dangling prize of graduation, and something much more. And it was not far off.


	2. Strategy

The day before their final task dawned. 

Mazer opened his eyes before the punishing sun of Eros could crest the faded light purple cliffs, jagged in their clarity, which dotted the surface of the planet. He liked to watch the hot yellow disc rise into view, making everything a monochrome bone. 

He liked the equity. 

He stood, shirtless in the pre-morning dark, and did breathing exercises. Mazer awakened every time like this, his body attuned to the wishes of his mind so that every aspect of rest was controlled and monitored. 

The hard, flat planes of his pectorals shifted as his lungs took in as much of the re-saturated-oxygen air as possible. When he exhaled, it was like his abdominals became canyons, the ridges between them deep and defined. He heard no one approaching, so when there was a soft but insistent knock at his door Mazer was caught off guard—for a moment. 

As he swiveled upward on one toe from his one legged squat, a calm but intense focus etched on his tattooed features, he called: “Enter.” 

It was Ender. 

“What are you doing here?” inquired the Colonel. 

Amazingly, the young boy looked down at his feet for the briefest of moments. It wasn’t much, just the sharpest glide downward of blue sky then back up to white.

“I wanted to ask you a question, sir,” said Ender. There was no waver in his voice, no indecision. 

A small smile touched the corner of Mazer’s lips. “Is it a legitimate one?” 

No blush crept across the expanse of the young boy’s face, as Mazer would have imagined it, but instead the young Commander echoed Mazer’s controlled smile. The older man’s breath hitched even as he heard himself saying: There is a major flaw in you here. 

Stop.  
Go back.  
But he couldn’t, because that smile was a salute and a love note all at once. 

“I think so, sir,” Ender said. 

Mazer looked his pupil in the eye and saw all the raw potential of what the young boy had been and what he and the workings of Mazer’s colleagues had shaped into a thing of…

The word was beauty. A broken kind, but made more lovely by that same token. 

“Close the door and proceed,” the older man instructed. Even those words sent a thrill through him—even more so when he thought he felt the boy’s wandering gaze trace the surface of his bare skin as the door to Mazer’s quarters clanged shut. 

He watched as Ender took a breath and faced his enemy. 

“Are you proud of me?” he asked. 

Without thinking, Mazer uttered: “Yes.” 

He saw the intensity of pleasure that peaked across Ender’s cheeks, the flush in them this time not imagined. His ears followed the careful sound of the boy’s feet moving forward, confident but aware at the same time. He felt the molecules in the air around them become shared, breathed between. And he supposed that, while he was busy breaking the rules, he might as well break some more. 

Mazer leaned in, smelled the chemical scent of Institute-issued shampoo glistening in Ender’s hair, and pressed his lips against the young boy’s forehead. 

Every ability that Mazer possessed to analyze, contract, react, and intensify he utilized in that instant—for he wanted to remember the exact pressure of his mouth and therefore by Third Law pairing the exact pressure of Ender’s forehead against him; he wanted to remember the pattern of lights that pulsed behind his eyelids as they shut; he wanted to remember the vague but sweet taste of the boy’s skin as Mazer’s lips brushed aside the most negligent number of dermis cells; he wanted to remember the absolute nature of the silence that encased them. 

Then it was over, and Mazer still felt empty. But Ender wasn’t finished yet. 

He reached out and touched Mazer’s hand, and before then older man could say anything the tan brevity of his palm was cupping the boy’s cheek. His thumb brushed the deep red, almost purple of Ender’s lips—he felt their moisture cling to the pad of his finger. 

“Ender, stop this,” Mazer breathed. The young Commander had him—for not even a tenth of a second he sensed the floodgates of emotion creaking under the strain of Mazer’s iron self-control. But it was enough. 

“So you feel it too,” said Ender. 

He moved his mentor’s hand downward, so it rested in the shallow of his shoulder and neck. He was a scrawny child no longer—Mazer could feel the hot tightness of muscle humming steadily beneath his fingertips. \

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ender whispered. 

“Because it’s wrong!” The Native New Zealander broke his charge’s grip with the speed of a cobra, finally finding his voice. He knew that, strategically, Ender had him at a disadvantage but Mazer couldn’t afford to lose now—he needed the young man (for, truly, he was a boy no longer, and whichever way the mission went today would ensure his unnatural jump to adulthood) out of his space before he did something really stupid. 

Ender saw what the Colonel was going to do before he did it—and so Ender kissed him. 

It was as chaste a kiss as it could be under those circumstances. It didn’t take long for Mazer to realize the tactical value of Ender’s action:  
1) He had unbalanced his enemy  
2) He had prevented his enemy from realizing a goal (Mazer had been reaching for the, “CALL ALL RECRUITS” button but because of the way Ender had positioned himself Mazer no longer had access to it).  
3) He had taken himself one step closer to reaching his own goal (as slender white fingers caressed the back of Mazer’s neck, there was very little stopping him from intuiting what the young Commander’s endgame was).  
And some small part of him acknowledged these things with the firm nod of approval which belied his inner praise for such a brilliant young mind. But there was more to it than that. 

He felt the burning need of fresh desire coursing through the young man, sensed the heady and unhindered passion that burned in him, a long-expected bonfire. It was so human, such a pure reminder of what they were fighting for, what Mazer had almost given his life for. Just a little bit, said the voice inside him, the voice that had been there ever since the day he had sat in front of a mirror with a hot needle and ink and made a monument of his tragedy. 

Just a little bit and then I’ll stop. 

So Mazer slammed his charge against the wall with the force of his oral response, but allowed himself no other points of contact—how the young man might feel against his bare and expectant skin was too much to bear. Everything else he thought he could handle. But when Ender’s tongue slid with agonizing precision against Mazer’s own the older man felt his own beast roar with the rage of yearning. He pulled back immediately.

He saw the sun on Ender’s sea eyes dip behind a cloud, and he couldn’t believe he heard himself saying: 

“I can’t.” 

Ender had never heard the Colonel’s voice so open, so close to scrutiny and so on the brink of emotion. He felt the energy being restrained, the avalanche kept on hold for centuries in an icy prison. He tried logic. 

“I might not ever see you again.” 

“That is not an excuse for such a gross abandonment of regulation!” Mazer fired back. 

“Someone has to teach me this!” yelled Ender. 

Mazer watched the young man’s Adam’s apple bob with frustration, saw the muscles in his jaw clench and the tears being held back. 

“I have learned everything else. I can map the trajectory of a dozen different spaceships in my head as they approach launch orbit; I can reassemble all but the largest weapons devised by our military; I outperform on every single simulation you have thrown at me; I have been trained in hand to hand combat and I have killed; I have been in service to my world since I was a child! I have never had anything for my own!” 

“And you think I did?” Mazer shouted. 

“Then you know!” Ender cried. “That’s why I want it to be you!” 

Mazer\stopped. “What?”

For the second time that day, the ramrod-straight posture of the young Commander slouched inward ever so slightly, and the eyes caved toward the floor. Mazer watched it happen, a collision in slow motion. 

“I want it to be you who teaches me this, and you alone.” 

Mazer looked away so Ender wouldn’t see the lightning flashing on his face, the electric crackle of fulfillment and victory. Yet there was still a quiet rain of sorrow for the young man, for all that he could have been and all that they disallowed him from being. He chanced a subtle look at his pupil—the defiant but pleading stance, the fist clenched above the hip to make it look like a standard at ease position but Mazer could almost feel Ender’s nails cutting into his palm. 

“Give me an hour,” Ender said. The older man heard the lilt of the young Commander’s voice checkmark upward at the end, a note of music.  
His mind was made up.

“A whole hour to yourself, Andrew Ender Wiggins?” Mazer’s bare feet made no sound on the rocky floor as he approached the young man. He caught the quiet shaking of Ender’s right hand, and knew that they were both past the point of moving pieces on a chess board for gain—or, at least, they would say they were. He touched the palm of Ender’s hand to the threshold of his own lips. The shudder that raced along the young man’s body was a magnetic pulse, a wave of senseless pleasure. 

As those strange, unabashed brown eyes caught him and held him, he knew that this day would shape him in the years to come. 

“What ever will you do with it?”


	3. Interrogation

"State your name." 

Ender hesitated. "Is this how it normally goes, sir?" he said. 

A moment later the sharp sting of a hand slapping his exposed backside hit him, startling and arousing at once. He was on his knees, leaned over the Colonel's bed, the suit pulled down so his body down to the curve of his ass kissed the open air. 

"State your name," repeated Mazer evenly. He was determined to be as detached and routine about this strange turn his mentoring had taken as he would have been with any other aspect of it. He had been far too open, far too emotional with his charge earlier--boundaries needed to be reestablished. But when he looked at the angry red mark he had left on the young man's skin and felt the rush of blood to his lower half, he knew it wasn't just obligation he did this for. 

"Andrew Ender Wiggins." 

"And what are the nature of your sexual experiences?" 

"I--" Ender trailed off, but Mazer waited. It pleased him (in a way that he knew was both wrong and undeniable) to see the young Commander so vulnerable, reduced by his need to the floor of the older man's bedroom, as plain and austere as it was. The contrast was somehow thrilling. 

Pink flooded Ender's cheeks, giving them a sensuousness the Colonel could not fail to notice. He peered with professorial intrigue at his young charge's body: the strongly but not thickly muscular frame; the marble (an image, long faded but still holding some of its original splendor, surfaced in Mazer's mind: angel) of his skin tinged the slightest red from the light of the burning sun; the taut and youthful look of his hindquarters... 

Mazer swallowed. Perhaps this hadn't been such a good idea after all. 

"I am waiting." This time, Ender expected the rap of a rough palm against him. 

Mazer knew this. Which was why he had doubled he force he put into the blow. 

He hadn't expected (but loved, in the way he had loved the Maori girl he had met at the age of sixteen) the barest exhalation of pained breath that flew from Ender's lips. Mazer bit the inside of his cheek until blood was drawn, but there was no shift of muscle in his face--he was doing his best (which was quite effective) to disguise the symptoms of the disease now consuming him. It hummed in his veins, electric. 

"I have not made any further sexual contact with another human being, sir, other than a kiss," said Ender. The older man wanted to collect the beads of moisture seeping into the open air from his charge's mouth with his tongue, to test the salinity levels of the boy's saliva and perhaps taste the memory of Ender's first kiss.

It was a thorough and specific response, which the Colonel appreciated. But it was not a complete one. "Who was it that you kissed?" 

Ender steadied himself before saying: "A person." 

The reply was insubordinate in the extreme, and Andrew Wiggins prepared himself for what was to come. The exquisiteness of the pain that spread across his ass was, this time, almost intolerable--but it wasn't as if Ender was unused to discomfort. It was more the involuntary contractions of the muscles in his abdomen and below that made him emit a moan that was the farthest thing from controlled. He found, to his horror, the white of his teeth pulling at his bottom lip: a habit he thought he had dispensed since the age of three. Then the fear and the open-ended exhilaration of discovery and depth and something else he could not quite explain found him...

What if Mazer realized what he was doing? 

The prospect hit him about .27 seconds before the other man validated his suspicions. Mazer's pupils dilated, creating an expanse of black--the brown remained, a dark star's corona. It took not long at all (even by Ender's succinct count) for the older man to step adroitly forward and grab the flesh covering his backside. The young man's incisors dug deeper into the already-discolored coral of his lip: in the wildness of his thoughts, he guessed that it had some sort of therapeutic value. But never before would he have allowed himself such leniency.

Caramel lips hovered beside his ear, and he felt the nerves in his ass alight with the pressure of his teacher's fingertips. 

"Are you enjoying this, Commander?" 

The tone was sharp, crisp, unamused--Ender cleared his throat before saying: "I don't fancy myself much of a masochist, Rackham." He had become adept at controlling the subtle fluctuations of his vocal cords --but it was not enough. 

A rich sensation enveloped him as he felt the pad of Mazer's thumb prod his entrance, the gentleness of the touch somehow more agonizing than the blows he had received earlier. Before he could say anything further, he felt the digit thrust inside him up to the knuckle, and when the older man felt Ender's entire musculature roll and shiver with suppressed motion, he gave a dry laugh: 

"You lie, Andrew Ender Wiggins." The warm heat of the other man's breath traveled down the young Commander's spine, stirring waves of gooseflesh. Mazer watched the intrinsically biological reaction with a violent yearning he both understood and feared. When he felt the young man's body contract around him, pulling him deeper inside, he jerked his hand out and stepped back. 

All the trapped energy and want made his abdomen rigid. He let time pass, glancing ever so briefly at his watch. The look Ender gave him behind a mask of authority and confidence almost made him waver. 

"What do you think this is?" he demanded. 

"I think that you have feelings for me that you cannot control, no more than I can control what it is that I feel for you." Turquoises pinned him to the ground with the force of their conviction. Subtlety, honesty, seduction--uniting all three was a line Ender could only walk for so long. But when he saw the older man's Adam's apple bob as he stripped the rest of his suit off, he knew he was advancing in the right direction. 

"What I feel is irrelevant. You have no physical, objective proof of your claims," said Mazer. 

"Is that so?" Ender raised an slender brow. He stood, revealing his body with an elegance that should have been criminal. He took a step toward his mentor. 

"Your eyelid just dipped a fraction of a centimeter," he said. The young Commander took another step and before the Colonel could muster a defense he said: 

"You just touched the tip of your left index finger to the nail on your left thumb." 

Mazer gave what amounted to a snort but, in his case, was more of a contemptuous sniff. "That proves nothing, Freud." 

Ender took another step. "Perhaps, but considering you as a person the movement was unnecessary, frivolous." He stared at his teacher from behind coal lashes. "And if there is anything you have taught me about yourself in our time together, it is that nothing you do is without purpose." 

The older man swallowed, and then cursed himself as he saw a smirk dance capriciously around the edges of his charge's mouth. Ender made no comment. 

"Perhaps you have just not guessed my purpose. It would not be the first time," said Mazer. Hesitation made a quiet cameo in Ender's eyes, and the Colonel seized his chance. 

"Often you have misguessed my intentions. And it has cost you." 

"I believe you are referring...to an incident that--" 

"Oh, Ender. What a foolish boy you still are." He unleashed a chuckle--honed over many years to cut and dig into the innermost reaches of the target's self-worth--and a smile that would have eaten sheep. The Colonel watched his verbal blade draw blood.

Lots of it. But the young man wasn't finished yet. 

He retreated to the bed, sitting down and hanging a head full of silken threads. Mazer expected an outburst, at the least a callous and challenging remark. 

What he did not expect was the sultry look that those ocean eyes gave him from behind a curtain of black.  
Or the pale tip of an index finger slipping between parted lips.  
Or the lazy path of that finger as it trailed down Ender's chest, circling the rose of his budding nipple.  
Or the shadow that fell over it as the young man reached between his legs and began, ever so slowly, to stroke himself. 

"Ender," blurted the Colonel. 

"Mmmnn..." Ender tilted his head back, offering the hollow of his white neck for inspection, the sharpness of his collarbone running parallel to the soft outline of his cheek. Mazer had once speculated that the androgyny of the boy would wear off as puberty did its work--but somehow the proteins being released in his charge's system had only enhanced his beauty.

He watched, immobilized by a warring of professionalism and desire, as Ender began to buck his hips earnestly into his hand. The thump of flesh on flesh was in synchronicity with the beating of the older man's heart, and he knew that he would be unable to hide his growing erection for much longer. The heat of him begged to be freed from the confines of his meditation pants. 

The young man was beginning to sweat. Liquid beaded on his forehead, between his pectorals--Mazer observed with a kind of horrified fascination as Ender positioned his other hand in between his ass cheeks. As he watched the young Commander finger himself with wanton abandon, the Colonel knew he was approaching the point of no return.


	4. Gateway

Mazer thought he had gotten himself under control. He did breathing exercises and played a game of chess against himself inside of his head--the combination lowered his heart rate significantly and abated the hunger in his loins and the sweet stabbing sensations in his heart.

That was when Ender caught his gaze and said: "Mazer."

His tongue was not the sweet, innocent pink that Mazer had imagined. Rather it matched his mouth, a dark, sensuous purple--the same colors running together as the young man licked and toyed with his bottom lip. Numerous allusions to fruit rose, tidal, in the older man's mind-- _  
The royal plum of his ripe lips spilled like rivulets of blackberry juice cupping white, unblemished skin..._ The skin Mazer was trying so desperately hard not to ravish. But as the boy spit more clear saliva onto his hand, redoubling his efforts at self-pleasure, another thought hit the Colonel with the frightening and uncanny speed of neurons firing: what if Ender _came_?

For a moment (that was all it took, for intellects like theirs) Mazer imagined the young, slender body bent over as seminal fluid (containing the millions of double helixes which sustained such perfect imperfection) sprayed its combination of fructose, enzymes, and antibacterial agents onto the clinical sheets of his bed, matching it in everything but shape. He imagined the giddy flood of dopamine surging through his charge's hyperdeveloped brain, the wave of pure pleasure that would shudder through Ender with a physicality Mazer could almost feel. He imagined the unconscionable moan that would breech the young man's lips and spiral out like a hurricane torn loose.

All of that, without Mazer having once touched him.

For only the second time he could remember since getting his tattoos, the irrational beast lurking within Mazer Rackham moved faster than the rational man: without sense, without preamble, he had crossed the room in three swift strides. Ender found his hands torn from the most sensitive parts of his body and slammed with rough and uncaring force against the headboard, pinned there as he watched years of experience crumble behind brown eyes that were glinting like hardened steel, trying desperately to recapture some semblance of control. The control that Ender, he reconfirmed to himself, had been steadily chipping away at for the past fifteen minutes.

The boy laughed, a horrible and beautiful sound. 

Mazer stayed silent, waited for an explanation. There was not enough evidence for him to make a judgement as to the cause of his charge's sudden mirth. With a cocksure amusement suggested more by the absence of a complete grin than its presence, Ender said one word:

"Pride."

It was the wrong word.

With a barbarity that would have destroyed any normal human being, even Ender's fellow "students", Mazer grabbed the back of the young man's head and slammed it into the folds of the mattress, burying his cries of sick pleasure as the older man pummeled his backside with blows. Rage had ever been the color red, for Mazer, and he beat the sensitive skin of Ender's ass until it matched the seething, toxic temperament that had seized him. Then he yanked the boy's head up by his hair, feeling with a voracious vindication threads of fine blackness separate from the young man's scalp as he did so. He turned the dazed face to his own, covering flushed lips with the suffocating pressure of his mouth. Ender was not surprised to feel the sting of canines driving into him as the brutal kiss continued, and when Mazer finally regained himself somewhat there was a gorgeousness to the salt crimson trickling from the bruised young mouth that the older man could not deny, no matter how hard he tried.

There was a brief and terrible, _What have I done_ , before Mazer found himself pushing his fingers into his charge's already-violated mouth, the sensation of Ender's bodily fluids coating his calloused fingertips a sin. When he pulled them out his soldier's ears caught the barest exhalation of breath ( _key of A_ , he thought absently) that was akin enough to a whimper that Mazer almost came. The expressions contorting his charge's features as wet fingers slipped inside of Ender's tightness were exquisite: the older man buried his brow in the soft hollow of Ender's shoulder so he wouldn't have to look.

But after he had licked behind Ender's ear, feeling the boy clench around him, vicelike, he surfaced. And didn't look away.

With an adolescent quickness and an experienced acrobat's fluidity, Mazer removed his pants, revealing a throbbing member whose size would surely hurt the young man spread like a cooked meal before him. It was then, and only then, that Mazer admitted to himself that he would not stop.

He didn't _want_ to stop.


	5. Surrender

The way it felt to slide inside him was indescribable. In his mind, Mazer tried to make sense of it.

The rings of muscle ( _external sphincter_ ) that caught the breadth of him as he entered his young charge were almost painfully restricting, and any doubts he may have been harboring about Ender's virginity were dispelled, if they had not been already. He counted the number of nerves his length brushed against as the tip of him delved further: there was no suppleness or sweetness to the burying, only a blind and animal need. When he had filled his charge to the hilt, and felt the tip of him brush ever so slightly against the shared wall of Ender's anus and prostate (an action which caused the young man's back to arch in a perfect parabola, sixty degrees of anatomic symmetry arcing from the downward curve of his tailbone to the deep ridges of his shoulder blades and back again) he stopped.

For Ender, the cessation of that feeling was torture. For Mazer, it was a victory.

He had already deduced that Ender triggering his deep-seated, sadistic anger (a feat which the ample analytic side of him applauded, albeit rather coldly) was the the fail safe way for the young man to get what he wanted. Appealing to Mazer's more positive emotions (those shriveled and decayed things which had lain sunken and rotting within him for so long he no longer even noticed the presence of their carcasses) was not something the boy could count on, though initially he had tried. Next had come the seduction, which had very nearly succeeded. But that, too, was an aspect of Mazer's biology and personality that he had long ago learned to cage, however much his charge could especially find ways to stir whatever was inside--and so there the young man had failed as well.

But punishment was something that they both had learned to count on. And so Ender had chosen his, a perversion of what he really wanted, though even Mazer could not be entirely sure that he was not fulfilling the exact version of the young man's fantasy.

 _You_ would _think that, wouldn't you?_ , came the unbidden thought. A growl, something so hilariously primal Mazer hadn't even considered doing it in decades (much less nearly involuntarily committing such an act) rose and died in his throat. Guilt did not become Colonel Mazer Rackham: he drove into the previously unexplored halls of his charge's innermost regions with a renewed and rapacious vigor.

"Mmmnn...don't stop..."

The breathless words rolled through the older man with an intensity akin to the first time he ever killed someone: the smell of gunpowder--rich, acrid, nostalgic--assailed him as hopelessly alluring and inscrutable blue eyes turned to look back, unflinching, at their ravager. He heard himself swear with an openness that was more frightening to him than the Fornix.  
 _Ender..._ The remnants of Rackham's heart wrenched, surprising him with their presence yet again. But neither emotion was enough to keep him from continuing to shape the tips of his fingers with violent accuracy into the curve of the young man's pelvic bones as the sound of flesh, caramel and cream, _thunked_ with a six-four rhythm, echoing in the small bedchamber like rain.

"If you would seek to get me to rest, you're going to have to do better than cliched pornographic lines from the last century," said Rackham, breaths deep and even though every tautness of muscle within and without was concentrated on drawing every semblance of contact between their sweat-coated bodies.

A lazy smile bloomed on Ender's face: one that was not a barely-contained grimace; nor a realistic imitation; nor a post-win expression of triumph. The sudden, genuine nature of it startled Mazer so much that he did indeed stop. It was the opportunity the young man had been waiting for--with a quickness Mazer knew would have caused no small or even moderate amount of discomfort, Ender extricated himself from the largeness of the older man.

He watched with rapt attention as his charge rose up on his knees and turned--with an elegance that should not have been there, due to the intrinsically crablike nature of the movement--to face him. He soaked in the high contrast of light and dark ( _everything is saturated differently here, you must remember that_ ) playing up the angles in Ender's slender neck, the hollow between his shoulder and collarbone, the dip of his clearly defined stomach muscles. He heard the the slow, flat drip of liquid on fabric. He had been expecting it.

Ender reached between his raw buttocks--as expected, his hand came away stained the same color as the not-so-slowly growing pool on the thin white sheet. The look he gave Mazer was anything but accusatory: those ice water surfaces were devoid of all animosity, empty of any negative feeling. The older man felt something that took him over two seconds to identify. Panic. 

The light but warm pressure of the boy's fingertips was something out of a Biblical apostle's conversion--his gaze dropped to the older man's strong, corded neck, his touch following the well-trodden path of Mazer's arteries down to the man's powerful chest, rising and falling in tandem with the quiet but steady pulsing of his cardiac muscle. He did not miss the minutest of fluctuations in his mentor's breathing patterns as his fingertips brushed against the rich earthen tone of Rackham's left nipple.

"You have proven that you're in control," said Ender. His fingers did not cease in their movement as he spoke: they journeyed down the desert expanse of Rackham's mountain range of stomach, then up again, but this time with the back of his hand. The dichotomy of keratin, smooth yet hard, made Mazer shiver noticeably.

 _I'm doomed_ , he thought. He was on the brink of not caring.

The sensitivity of his testicles were cupped and explored with a tenderness that was utterly foreign to him, and when those feather-weighted hands skimmed his length: in another world he envisioned himself crying out in earnest. He did nothing to hide the audible nature of oxygen leaving his lungs when a sudden hot wetness covered his head--Ender's mouth. How the virginal boy managed to be so skilled in such a carnal art--something that usually required more practical experience as opposed to theoretical knowledge--remained a mystery Mazer was content not to give further thought to, other than to appreciate the thorough and maddening sensations traveling from his member and reverberating along electric channels to his brain and back. 

It ended too soon, but that was Ender's prerogative.

He toyed with his shredded and red-crescent crusted lower lip as he reached out to caress the cut of Mazer's jawbone. _I am his bloody, broken bride_ , thought some part of him long since gone AWOL, presumed dead; a more rational, but less dogmatic part of him said: _Don't be an idealist_.

"Do you think I fear pain, Colonel?" he asked softly.

Pale arms wound around Mazer's neck as the young man pressed his body against the older man's, curves silhouetted by the air flowing and not flowing between them. Half lidded eyes and a grin pulled to one side captured Mazer: he saw his own startled need, a different one than before, reflected back in the moment before Ender leaned in gently and pressed their mouths together. It was the most chaste and arousing kiss Mazer had ever received--its taste would linger, the ghost of a murderous passion never again attainable. Never forgotten.

"I don't," he continued. "So if this"--he gestured to the bloodied sheets, to his own streaked and loosened body--"is how you want me..."

Rackham heard the boy's name falling from his lips: but like so many things he had said this morning, the tinny, faraway soundwaves echoed against his eardrums, making doubt his own lucidity and whether or not he had ever said them at all. _How far you have fallen_ ,he said to himself: but for once the thought was discarded as quickly as it had made its presence known.

"...then take me."


	6. Fearless

Unafraid. Undaunted. Unflinching. 

Mazer ran calloused fingertips along the exaggerated, pubescent rows of Ender's ribcage, traced them with a deliberate slowness the young man had to close his eyes to fully appreciate. He wanted to feel the thin pulsing of blood that resounded throughout Ender's body, subtle but monumental. This ill-conceived, ill-executed thing had promise--a promise Mazer could no longer afford to run from. With a gentleness so in contrast to the spirit of his earlier trespasses, he placed both palms parallel to the curvature of the young man's cheekbones and kissed him. Ender thought giddily, before surrendering himself to the unhurried, unexpected tenderness: _I passed the test._

Slowly, delicately, Mazer mapped the inside of his charge's mouth; staked his claim on the young man by tracing his tongue over the hollows of every brilliant white tooth, every thought and ability focused on drawing a reaction with the least amount of movement. After he had had sufficiently explored all thirty two peaks, saving the budding third molars for last, Mazer glided to the boy's lips. He cleaned the blood there, wetting the mottled surface and removing all traces of red, taking exquisite care not to further damage the tattered skin and avoiding the most painful areas with a consideration marked by extensive knowledge. 

He finished; looked at the young man kneeling on his bed. Blue giant supernovae stared back at him, moist, intense yet shaken in their desire. The sharp angle of Mazer's nose (the word could only be "nuzzled") the back of Ender's neck, feeling the tiny hairs there stand on end. Blackness throbbed at the edges of the young man's vision as he felt Mazer's teeth graze, intoxicatingly, the shell of his outer ear.

"Breathe," said his mentor: Ender had forgotten how to.

A trail of kisses outlined the side of his neck, the rolling hill of his trapezius and the firm mound of his shoulder, contracting and lengthening to the steady pace of skin to lip contact. Ender felt his surface temperature rising, wondered at his body's intrinsic reactions with the duality of scientific observation and newfound experience. He had done the research: access to unimaginable amounts of information was one of the many perks of being a student of the Institute. He watched tan move against alabaster, thought: _Incomparable_. 

"Lie back" was a command he didn't think he had ever been so keen to follow.

When he felt the older man's mouth swallow the whole length of him, enveloping his most sensitive organ in 37.9 degrees Celsius of fitted wetness, he moaned aloud. Mazer imprinted the sound onto his subconscious, in the hopes that he would hear it again in his dreams. He worked Ender's head to a state of weeping frenzy, only to retreat with agonizing laboriousness back to a less sensitizing rhythm, teasing the younger man time and again to the brink until Ender gasped raggedly: "Please."

Rich mahogany raked the path of his stomach, catching his gaze and making him shiver with unfulfilled need. Mazer did not break eye contact as he took the entirety of the young man's scrotum in his mouth--the unexpectedly thrilling sensation forced Ender's hands behind him to the headboard, gripping there with a dogged strength that belied how much he had already lost control and how little there was left to go before he found himself screaming his teacher's name with utter abandon.

 _At least the walls are soundproof,_ the young man thought wryly.

Once he was completely certain Ender was a throbbing, needy mess (which he had already confirmed over a minute ago, but while his charge had been enjoying the pressure and suction of Mazer's mouth, the older man had been cataloging the tenuous variations of taste in Ender's preseminal fluid) he moved downward to the boy's opening, starting at the halfway point of the young man's ass cheek. He moved inward, painting water-and-electrolyte stripes on the canvas of Ender's skin. 

It took Ender .76 seconds to realize that the older man was wiping the earlier blood away with his mouth. Pain was minimal, considering that the moderate acidity of the older man's saliva should have stung the soft tears in his rectum, indicative of Mazer's consummate familiarity with the human anatomy. He lapped his lapse in discipline and care like an apologetic dog; savored it like a fine wine. It was the closest he would come to an apology.  
After a moment, Mazer surfaced to admire the way Ender's skin glistened under his recent ministrations (managing to clean and lubricate at once), his charge doing his best not to squirm in discomfort over the sudden lack of physical contact.

_I'll not keep you waiting._

The upside-down V of his shoulders down to his rippling torso cast a shadow over Ender as his mentor leaned toward him; he felt the bed rumple as strong fingers imprinted themselves on either side of his head. The edge of him nudged against where the heat of Ender's pleasure was centered, a soft and yielding prediction. Ender bit his lip again; Mazer could not help but kiss him, and as he held the young man suspended by the strength of his brimming energy, he wished selfishly that the world be left to its own devices, forgetting them and releasing them at once to the service of the other.

"Is this how you would have it?" asked Mazer. The richness of his voice, rolling hills and deep valleys, touched shudderingly the ice and fire fighting incessantly within Ender's body. The boy in him cried at the sincerity in his teacher's voice. 

His hand glided under his upraised leg, grasping Mazer's shaft. He felt the other man buck reflexively into his tight and calloused grip.


End file.
